Suno asks court to dismiss musicians' right-of-publicity suit over artist-name prompts

What happened

On 3 November 2026, Suno, Inc. filed a motion to dismiss the proposed right-of-publicity class action brought by Jason Isbell, David Lowery, Guy Forsyth and Eduardo Calle in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Case No. 1:26-cv-14005-AK (Judge Angel Kelley). It is Suno's first major response to the suit, filed 31 August 2026, which accuses Suno of letting users evoke musicians' identities by entering their names as prompts in its AI song generator.

Suno's arguments

Suno argues the musicians' claims fail as a matter of law. Its central claim is that artists' names are used as shorthand for musical genres and styles, not as commercial appropriation of identity: "When people describe styles of music, they often use artists' names as shorthand for the genre they perform in." A request for a song in the style of Isbell is, the motion says, converted into a request for "contemporary Americana singer-songwriter with fingerpicked acoustic guitar" before it reaches the model, and a "Duran Duran" prompt becomes "New wave, Synth-pop, Pop rock." Suno says it does not train its model to recognise artist names and that there is no "artist name" metadata field in the source material used to train the model.

The motion also argues the claims are barred by the First Amendment and preempted by the federal Copyright Act, on the ground that Congress chose not to protect artistic style. It asks for dismissal of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act claim for lack of standing (and, under the first-to-file rule, at least a stay in light of an October 2025 BIPA suit by songwriter David Woulard), and argues the named plaintiffs' individual state-law claims fail under the laws of Tennessee, Georgia, Texas and Florida.

What this does and does not change

Nothing has been decided: the plaintiffs' opposition is due by 1 December 2026 and Suno's reply by 15 December 2026. The 84-page complaint contains no copyright claim, so this motion does not touch the record labels' separate training-copyright suits against Suno (Universal and Sony's second suit, filed 18 September 2026, continues; Warner Music settled in November 2025). All allegations about Suno's training and outputs remain allegations.